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Climate Panel Says To Prepare For Weird Weather
Layzej writes "Extreme weather, such as the 2010 Russian heat wave or the drought in the horn of Africa, will become more frequent and severe as the planet warms, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns in a report released today. Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes. Critics of the report note that 'Governments have in the past considerably weakened the language of IPCC summaries for policymakers,' and that the IPCC process tends to water down even the most obvious conclusions."
The planet warming WILL result in regions cooling because it disrupts the heat transfer mechanisms. Central Europe cooling would likely be disruption to the trade winds and the Atlantic Conveyer. It is extremely naive to assume that global warming equates to local warming and the fact that your environment is the coldest in 50 years really should have tipped you off.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You would do well to consider that flooded server rooms may have an adverse impact on the IT infrastructure.
Same can be said for production facilities. Take the recent example of Thailand floods causing an hard drive shortage that is steadily driving prices up.
Adverse weather will only make things gradually more challenging, requiring more technical know-how and workarounds to deal with it.
Would help if there weren't so many left wing nut jobs (read: Republicans) telling the world that abortion is murder, and religious fools (read: The Vatican) that contraception is a sin.
This is the same IPCC that said we wouldn't have any glaciers by 2010, or icesheets, or that the northwest passage would be open to traffic(never mind it's been open to traffic since it was first charted). Or that there would never be snow again on various mountains, and so on and so forth. Or that we'd all be dead what was it this year? Or is it next year? I can never keep it straight with all these doomsday predictions from all these environmental groups, and government backed organizations.
Reading fail. The IPCC never said we wouldn't have glaciers or ice sheets by 2010. I'd be willing to put my whole retirement savings up to bet you can't back that statement up (and I'm 59 years old so I have some). I wouldn't call requiring a heavy duty ice breaker to get through the northwest passage in less than a couple of years "open to traffic".
Guys like you never examine the projected time frames on IPCC (and other climate scientists) statements very carefully. You think everything's going to happen in the next 5 or 10 years and if it's longer than that you don't think it's worth worrying about.
A destroyed climate is as bad for a hundred people as it is for 7 billion, so it would matter exactly as much.
Limit you all? LIMIT? Necessity is the mother of invention. If you feel limited by a need to invent, you're on the wrong site. Besides, what are these "limits" of which you speak? You can reduce pollution by increasing efficiency. Increased efficiency means you get more out for the same amount in (since you can't violate the law of conservation of matter and energy and therefore what would be pollutants are now something useful instead). That sounds like a recipe for profits, not limits.
Moving off coal and adopting nuclear fission (for now, fusion later) doesn't LIMIT you. You get much more power on the grid for less fuel and much less pollution. The miners won't be getting lung cancer or blown up in methane explosions, so saving lives and cutting medical (and rescue) expenses, all at the same time. Those freed-up people, if educated and retrained, could be a marvelous resource to tap into. The mistake made by many shifts in industry is to neglect the fact that humans are a powerful and valuable resource. Ignoring them limits your scope for imagination, exploration and development.
And let's examine that for a moment. Here's thousands, if not tens of thousands, of opportunities to try new things, explore new ideas and grow. Who but a fool would call that a limit?
Use the potential that change brings! Ignoring it and wasting it won't stop it, but it will limit what good can come from it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nobody makes the obvious point.
Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes.
Great. And how is this different from before ? My grandfather left north holland because it became too cold. Before that I'm told that a few dambreaks (presumably caused either by storms, rising sea level, or in the worst case incompetence) cause my family to leave a place between Amsterdam and Zeeland. That's just the last 200 years, maybe less (I only have generations to go on, not years. And there sure were a lot of dambreaks in the 19th century).
This is not an exception. Just read this : http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/06/20-abandoned-cities-and-towns/.
That's again just the last century (and not all climate related, some are though). But going further back there's plenty of stuff. 2000 years ago, the Sahara was lush green forest, filled with civilized black people (not arabs, who since exterminated them) who at one point dared attack Rome, and there was serious concern that campaign might succeed (and it did manage to cast aside 4 Roman legions, 3 in less time than it took the senate to notice their legions were gone, never mind decide what to do about it. They didn't do anything about it). The only reason there are Europeans in Europe is climate change in Eastern Asia. This is not news.
Where do we get the weird idea that climate was constant before today ? Where do we get the massive egocentric idea that it will start staying constant for us ? Gaia is a fickle godess that constantly slays things from houses, to cities, to entire states.
I am not saying that "there isn't something going on", but I do remember being taught how Darwinism categorizes species : adapt ... or die.
The whole strategy that seems to be pushed implicitly here seems to me a strategy that falls squarely in the latter category. Trying to keep things constant is not just a losing strategy, it's the way to extinction.
James Lovelock, the grandfather of geoplanetary science, agrees with you. I'm not inclined to argue the point with him, since he has been right on every prediction so far and is the inventor of the best model we have of how planetary systems work.
My argument is the same one as it has always been - the top 2% of the population are Mensa-level, which means we've 140,000,000 geniuses planet-wide. That is more than adequate, provided they have the education and the resources, to prepare humanity for what is inevitable and to prevent what is inevitable from being any worse. That's not even including those who are brilliant in ways IQ cannot measure, so you might need to double or triple the brainpower that can be let loose on this.
You'd need to be willing to spend money. Over the next ten years, the US would need to double its debt just to educate its own. I did the calculation for that a while back on Slashdot for those interested in how I got that figure. However, it could be done. You just have to want to.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When (and sadly, not if at this point) China and Russia go to war
How can you sit there and spew this FUD? What could possibly make you think that you're smart and knowledgeable enough to definitively predict such things?
Aww yes, nothing is happening and we can't do anything about it if it was happening. Same old bullshit story (or non story).
Maybe you think weather patterns are not leading indicators of climate change, but they are the canary in the coal mine as harbingers of what's to come.
Second point-no need to do anything about emissions cause the economy is just too damn scary. Here's a newsflash that you might not have completely thought through-when is it going to become too expensive to rebuild the communities that get hit by tornadoes, hurricanes, extreme snowfall, etc? Think about it, billions to rebuild entire towns/cities in this economy. Soon we will decide whether if your home is worthwhile to rebuild or just creat a greenspace.
P.S. I live in New Orleans and know of the expense and toil of what I speak.
Won't Bow.....Don't Know How
People die. We are not immortal. But to claim that we don't have to worry about a poison gas cloud coming our way because people die anyway is ludicrous. The argument that X happens naturally, therefore we need not be concerned about X, only appeals to those who want to dismiss a topic they find uncomfortable to deal with.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I live in Canada. As you say, all of those areas are already highly productive. What I was referring to is new productivity as a result of climate change. Areas that might become warmer--and thus suitable for agriculture--are currently boreal forest. It would take decades of natural processes for that boreal forest soil to develop into anything that could support agriculture for more than a season or two. North of this is tundra, which might have a better soil profile, but doesn't have enough daylight for agriculture regardless of temperatures or precipitation.